Books: Wessex and Louisiana

While the peoples of Europe turn to mass murder, training in the science
of murder, or defense against it, intelligent U. S. citizens are
becoming solemnly aware that the arts, scholarship and precious thought
of the West are in their keeping.

For in Europe's desperate atmosphere the free life of the intelligence
is suspended where it has not been crushed.

June 2 was the 100th birthday of the English novelist Thomas Hardy.
Neither in the little old town of Dorchester, where he lived, worked
and died, nor in London, where his ashes rest in Westminster Abbey, was
this anniversary marked so impressively as...